Understanding Field Types in Your Mappings

One thing to take into consideration when mapping your fields in Bedrock Data is the Field Type. There are multiple field type options that live within all systems. Some common terms used to describe these field options are:

Boolean

Text

Single-Select

Multi-Select

Date

Date/Time

Number

Some field types will speak to each other more seamlessly than others but it is recommended that when you are wanting to sync two fields together that they are setup as the same field type.

Here are a few scenarios where you will always want to ensure the field types are the same.

Multi-Select fields

A multi-select field can only sync with another corresponding multi-select field. No other field type will work so if you see a warning message saying that you have a multi-select mapped to a non-multi-select field you will want to address this as soon as possible to avoid sync errors.

Date Fields

Date fields only contain a date in the format yyyy-mm-dd. If mapped to a date/time field the date can be carried over but a time will not. While these two types of fields can be synced, Bedrock will flag them as a possible error.

Date/Time Fields

If you don't sync a Date/Time field from one system to another Date/Time field in another, you are likely to run into an issue with how the data syncs for this field. For example, if you map it to a text-based field, the value won't likely make sense to the end user reading the data. It will look like this (19847594).

Boolean Fields

These fields are simply an on/off type of field where the client often customizes what the customer is choosing when setting it to be on or off. The value that comes over for this field can either be read as 'true', 'false', '1', '0', and so on. In other words, if you sync a Boolean type field to say a text field in another system, you'll likely get one of the latter values to show up and this may not make much sense to the end user. So always set up a corresponding Boolean field when wanting to sync data for these field types.

The above terms used to describe different field types may not be the terms used by your given provider. For example, they may call a Boolean field a Checkbox field and so on. It's always a good idea to double check with your providers on the proper field types to use when you are setting up your mappings in Bedrock as having mismatched field types is one of the more common reasons customers run into syncing errors.

Number Fields

Number fields operate as they sound. The only type of data they contain is numbers. These field types can be synced to text or integer(int) fields, but limitations should be taken into consideration. Number fields will reject text values. Integer fields must contain whole numbers, meaning that decimals cannot be fed into them.